HYPERBOLIC sportswriter Damon Runyon dubbed Depression-era boxer James Braddock the “Cinderella Man” and sure enough, Ron Howard’s bio-pic is an Oscarbaiting fairy tale that manipulates the audience at every turn of the cliché.

Braddock is soulfully played by Russell Crowe, and if you adored “A Beautiful Mind,” his previous schmaltzfest with Howard – I didn’t – chances are you’ll love this ultrapredictable crowdpleaser, which is so square it makes the original “Rocky” look cutting edge and “Million Dollar Baby” positively avant-garde by comparison.

A washed-up fighter turned underemployed dockworker, Braddock seized America’s imagination by staging a remarkable series of comebacks that culminated in a 1935 heavyweight title fight against champ Max Baer.

Though the ultimate outcome is never remotely in doubt, most of the movie’s extremely moist first hour is devoted to Braddock’s fall from a comfortable home in North Bergen, N.J., to a cramped, squalid apartment (which looks remarkably like a movie set) that he shares with his bravely suffering wife (Reneé Zellweger), who waters down milk to feed their three personality-free children.

When work on the Hoboken docks dries up and he’s faced with the prospect of farming the kids out to marginally

Just when he’s hit bottom, Braddock’s former manager Joe Gould (Paul Giamatti) arranges Braddock’s first fight in years – they need a last-minute replacement for an elimination bout at Madison Square Garden (which has been mysteriously moved from its old location at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street to the middle of Times Square).

Aging underdog Braddock not only pulls off a series of stunning upsets (seemingly covered only by NBC, corporate parent of the studio releasing this movie) but becomes a champion of the people when he repays welfare payments (allegedly true, but it still smells like a sportswriter’s invention to me).

The biggest problem with the script by Akiva Goldsman (“A Beautiful Mind”) and Cliff Hollingsworth, aside from its utter inevitability, is that Braddock is portrayed as an utterly flawless human being.

“Cinderella Man” wouldn’t work at all with a lesser actor than Crowe, who may not score a knockout but wins on a decision, even if his director repeatedly cuts away from fight scenes for reaction shots and flashbacks.

Braddock is in some ways a less interesting character here than nominal villain Baer (well played by Craig Bierko), who killed two men in the ring before his bout with Braddock yet was charismatic enough to star opposite Myrna Loy in a major Hollywood movie.

Crowe has no chemistry whatever with the newly brunette Zellweger, who affects an annoying Jersey whine and is saddled with recurring visions of Braddock’s funeral in a thoroughly thankless role.

But he gets excellent support from Giamatti, whose dynamic and quick-thinking Gould is strikingly different than the sad sack loser the actor played in “Sideways.”

Gould figures in the movie’s most poignant scene, where Braddock and Mae pay a call at the Fifth Avenue apartment shared by Gould and his wife (an excellent cameo by Linda Kash), only to discover they’ve sold all their furniture to keep the wolf from the door.

The film also provides an intriguing glimpse of a shantytown, or Hooverville, in Central Park – but Howard and his screenwriters quickly abandon a subplot involving a quasi-Communist pal of Braddock’s played by Paddy Considine.

Instead “Cinderella Man” gives us non-stop uplift. At least the Depression-era hero of the far superior “Seabiscuit” wasn’t able to moan about problems paying his feed bills.